Review/Dance; Athletes and Plexiglass Share Stage in 'Impact'

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The best came last in a performance by the Elizabeth Streb Ringside company on Thursday night in the Altogether Different festival at the Joyce Theater. Just as it began to seem as if there would be nothing to the evening but brutal belly flops and collisions, Ms. Streb presented "Impact," a magical dance for six athletic performers, a Plexiglas panel and a frame hanging high over the stage, all bathed in gleaming white and yellow light. An assault on heaven, the piece had welcome moments of gentleness and wit that made it clear that these were not just bionic bodies, but fallible human beings.

The work had a decent quotient of extraordinary physical feats. A man slowly straightens from a squat, a woman balancing perilously on his shoulders as he rises. But then, after a measured walk back toward the panel, he flips up and she vaults to the other side and crashes against the glass, knocking the man flat as if by seismic repercussion. The sequence, a chain reaction of sorts, is breathtaking in its complexity, fluency and sly allusion to the knockabout physicality that is at the heart of Ms. Streb's work.

"Impact" is more nuanced than the three other pieces on the program. With two props to climb, perch on and dangle from, the dancers' bodies create much more intricate and interesting patterns, even curling up in other dancers' suspended, cradling limbs from time to time. Bodies squashed against the glass create funny, Halloween-style images.

Best of all, the dancers' reflections in the glass are like ghosts, multiplying like wandering battalions and sometimes seeming to serve as surrogates for the performers. And just as the pace of the surging, flying bodies has quickened to the teasingly insistent rhythms of a fireworks display's finale, the dancers suddenly pause in a simple final pattern, hanging in ranks in midair for an instant as the lights go out.

"Impact" was performed by Ms. Streb, Paula Gifford, C. (formerly Christopher) Batenhorst, Mark Robison, Hope Clark and Brian Levy. The structures were created by Ms. Streb, with lighting by Carol Mullins.

The choreographer's strong sense of design is epitomized in the way she has a single body crouch against the floor on all fours, back rounded, on the shadowy periphery of every dance. But other elements repeated from dance to dance are less interesting, and the dancers' yells and their shouted counting and commands get to seem numbingly stagey. Microphones embedded in the soft, mostly brightly painted dance floors make every thud resound. But in "Impact," the glass and frame also seemed miked and the effect symphonic in comparison, although there were moments when silent drops might have created a greater illusion of flight.

Ms. Streb's new "Link" starts out promisingly. Mr. Robison slowly rolls a blue tube forward and back across a square bound by a frame of blue neon lights, Ms. Clark balance-walking on it as it rolls. But the conceit is scarcely developed, making the duet pretty much indistinguishable from "Wall" and "Groundlevel," two recent pieces that completed the program.

A version of this review appears in print on January 12, 1992, on Page 1001036 of the National edition with the headline: Review/Dance; Athletes and Plexiglass Share Stage in 'Impact'. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe